List of tables
List of contributors
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Weaponised Bodies, Silenced Wars
Atlas Torbati
Chapter 1 - The Evolution of the Concept of Rape and Sexual Violence and Its Criminalization in International Criminal Law
Farshad Kashani
Chapter 2 - No Justice Without Peace for Survivors of Conflict-Related Gender-Based Crimes in Ukraine
Selena Vitti
Chapter 3 - Conflict related sexual violence in South Sudan: Factors affecting the reporting and response to sexual violence in conflict
Diana Dominyak
Chapter 4 - The Political Myth of State Sexual Violence: Implications for Feminist Resistance in Mexico
Gabriel Mondragón Toledo and Brenda Mondragón Toledo
Chapter 5 - Weaponising Gender: The Taliban’s Use of Sexual Violence as a Tool of Governance Since 2021
Shabnam Nasimi
Chapter 6 - Gendered Violence and Resistance in the Islamic Republic of Iran
Atlas Torbati
Chapter 7 - Historicising the Birangona: Interrogating the Politics of Commemorating the Wartime Rape of 1971 in the context of the 50th Anniversary of Bangladesh
Nayanika Mookherjee
Conclusion - Rethinking Sexual Violence: Governance, Conflict, and Justice
Atlas Torbati
Index
Biography
Atlas Torbati is a Senior Lecturer on the MA Understanding Domestic Violence and Sexual Abuse (UDVSA) at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has extensive experience researching gender‑based violence within diaspora communities, with a particular focus on how migration, displacement, and cultural belonging shape experiences of harm, help‑seeking, and recovery. Her work also examines the intersections between diaspora, mental health, and lived experiences of both women and men who have been subjected to gender‑based violence.
"Gendered violence in war and social conflict has a long, grim history. It was protested in Euripides' drama The Trojan Women, 2400 years ago. In our time, criminal law is sometimes called in, but the main problem is not individual perpetrators. With cases and ideas from around the global South, this book reveals powerful social dynamics that produce and magnify the gendered violence. Specific histories matter, and resistance takes different shapes. But most important, struggle against the violence continues."
Professor Raewyn Conell, University of Sydney, Australia
"This book reframes sexual violence in conflict as a tool of governance in conflict, exposing how it is sustained through institutional power, structural inequality, and regimes of silence. Centring an intersectional lens, it reveals how gender, ethnicity, class, age, displacement, and other axes of identity shape vulnerability, visibility, and access to justice. Through rigorous scholarship and survivor‑centred insight, the chapters in this book challenge reductive narratives and call for transformative, structural approaches to accountability that confront—not obscure—the political orders enabling such harm."
Professor Geetanjali Gangoli, Durham University, UK
